


Tapestry

by softestpunk



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Male!Eivor, mentions of canon major character deaths, spoilers for sciropescire arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:48:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28335687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestpunk/pseuds/softestpunk
Summary: Eivor wonders how many scars on Ubba’s body belong to Ivarr, and he wonders how many scars of his own will. They are both tapestries of the people who have touched them—in anger, in hatred, in love, and in passion. Now they are woven together forever, tangled up in each other, inseparable even by the most skilled weaver, and Eivor thinks this is good, and right.After the events of Sciropescire, Ubba and Eivor find comfort in one another.
Relationships: Eivor/Ubba Ragnarsson
Comments: 15
Kudos: 101





	Tapestry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quills_at_dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quills_at_dawn/gifts).



After a long, cold, hard day, bedding down in the longhouse at Quatford is a luxury Eivor would have given many hoards of silver for, and he will ever be grateful that it was offered whole-heartedly by Bishop Deorlaf, a man Eivor feels he should not like quite so much as he does.

He is starving, and aching, and the smoke of Ivarr’s funeral pyre is still clinging to him, hanging like a stormcloud, and the weight of missing Ceolbert sits heavy under his heart, a stone that will not be shifted no matter how much he claws at it.

All of these facts make him disinclined to do anything about the hunger or the ache. He will not die of either before morning, they can be seen to then.

He has just eased himself down onto a gloriously soft pile of straw when a shadow passes over him, bringing with it a scent he knows.

Ubba.

“If you have come to kill me, I am too tired to fight,” Eivor says, and perhaps Ubba will kill him, and this whole sorry saga will be at an end.

It would almost be a mercy.

“We missed you, raising a horn to Ivarr,” Ubba says, and it might have been a reproach, but instead it overflows with doe-gentle concern.

Eivor forces himself to look at Ubba, towering broadly over him, nearly blocking all the light from the lanterns placed around the longhouse in Eivor’s quiet little corner near the goats.

“I had neither the heart nor the stomach for it,” Eivor says, shifting to sit up out of respect and hissing as his wounds shift.

Ubba passes him a plate of food as he moves, with more grace than a man his size and age ought to possess, to sit beside Eivor. “And yet you must eat,” Ubba says. “Sigurd would not forgive me if I sent his prize drengr back to him thin and unwell.” A pause. “You’re hurt.”

“Ivarr was not gentle,” Eivor explains, hesitant to recount the details of his slaying of Ubba’s brother—to anyone, ever, but especially the man himself.

Ubba snorts, which is unexpected.

“You see this scar?” Ubba says, gesturing to a long line that breaks up the otherwise beautiful tattoo on the inside of his arm. “Ivarr did that.”

“You fought?” Eivor asks.

“Over a scrap of lamb,” Ubba says. “Not even the last one. He struck nearly unprovoked.”

This, Eivor is less surprised by than he thinks he is meant to be. He is more surprised by what Ubba means by it—that Ivarr was always unpredictable, that it is a wonder he did not do worse and sooner.

Comfort. Ubba says this to offer comfort.

“Eat,” Ubba says while Eivor struggles to find the words to say that he is not sorry Ivarr is dead, but he is sorry Ivarr is _gone_.

He was a madman of the worst kind, but the world is a poorer place without him all the same. A safer, calmer, more peaceful place, but Ivarr is the kind of man the sagas remember.

And Eivor is woven forever into the one of his death. He wonders if the skalds will remember him as hero or villain, but finds he does not care to know. His bones will be ash long before they sing of him.

Eivor eats, at first only to humour Ubba, but then with increasing hunger, and when Ubba passes him a horn of mead after all, he drinks that down greedily as well, gasping for air when he’s done. It feels like the first breath he’s taken since he found Ceolbert in that cave.

“You’re hurt,” Ubba says simply as Eivor sets the plate aside and passes his horn back.

“It’s nothing,” Eivor says automatically, unaccustomed to letting others know the extent of his pain.

“I have spent my _entire_ life cleaning up Ivarr’s messes,” Ubba says, echoing earlier words that seem so distant now Eivor is not sure he really has heard them before. “This is his last one. Let me clean.”

Eivor draws breath to object, but the look in Ubba’s eyes—pleading, not ordering—stops him.

He nods, once, and Ubba nods in return.

The process of stripping his armour off is long and slow, revealing more about the bruised and broken state of his body than Eivor would like. Ubba is practiced at this, gentle despite his enormous frame, but then Ivarr once said as much, didn’t he? That Ubba was soft.

After such a hard few days, Eivor is not immune to the temptation of softness.

He hisses as Ubba brushes an unhealed nick, the salt of his fingers making the wound sting more now than when he got it. In the heat of battle there is no pain, but Eivor is not seventeen anymore, and his body aches in the aftermath.

Ubba must ache twice as badly after a battle, he thinks, studying the few grey hairs in his beard in wonder. Not every man lives a warrior’s life long enough to go grey.

“You may have bested him,” Ubba says. “But he did not go down easy.”

“He did not,” Eivor agrees, and the weight in his heart lightens a fraction as Ubba smiles. It is not the broad, pleased smile he has favoured Eivor with before, it is a small, tired, withered thing, but still warm.

Ubba’s hands, too, are warm. He strips Eivor to the waist, and even without a fire, Eivor is not cold as Ubba runs broad hands over him, smoothing a salve over cuts and bruises, frowning at the worst of them.

“Some of these need stitching and bandaging,” Ubba says, standing.

Eivor watches him go until he disappears, and then stares at the empty doorway until Ubba fills it again.

His heart lightens another fraction at the care Ubba shows him.

Their friendship is not forfeit, it seems.

Good. Eivor has lost too many friends recently to bear the loss of yet another so soon, of one of the very first he made in this green and pleasant land. He still remembers the glow of pride and awe he felt when Ubba handed him the arm ring that signified their alliance.

And even now, after everything that has passed, Ivarr handing him an axe still warm from the body he pulled it out of makes him laugh.

“Something funny?” Ubba asks, eyebrow raised.

“I…”

Perhaps he shouldn’t say it. Perhaps it will feel callous—Ubba’s loss is greater than his. But he wants to talk about Ivarr. About the things he admired, about the friendship they’d forged despite their differences.

“I was thinking of Ivarr,” Eivor says in a rush. At worst, Ubba will walk away to cool off, and he will lose the gentle touches and the help bandaging his wounds, and he will have to limp back to Ravensthorpe in search of the comfort he so desperately needs.

At best, they may find comfort in each other.

“Handing me that axe when we sealed our friendship,” Eivor finishes.

“You have not lost your alliance, Wolf-Kissed,” Ubba says. “I am still sworn to you. Your clan,” Ubba corrects, and Eivor is not sure if he should take the latter as an insult or the former as a slip.

“And your friendship, Ubba?” Eivor asks, the need to be sure overwhelming his better judgement. “You would be within your rights to kill me, but I would wish a different fate for us.”

“You have not lost my friendship, Eivor,” Ubba murmurs, handsome face thrown into dramatic shadow in the low light as he looks out into the longhouse, toward where they sent Ivarr on his final journey. “I wish…”

“Speak your wish,” Eivor commands, feeling bold. They are both lost, but one of them must steer or they will drift forever.

“I wish the burden of Ivarr’s madness had not fallen on your shoulders,” Ubba says. “I wish you had not lost Ceolbert to it. I wish I had dealt with Ivarr before all of this.”

Ubba ties off the last bandage, tucking the ends with the care of a man handling a newly-hatched chick.

“It is not you who should be unsure of my friendship. You have done me no wrong. It is I who should be unsure of yours. The fault in this lies with me. I am the older brother, I am responsib—”

“You are not,” Eivor interrupts, hand raised, finger nearly pressed to Ubba’s lips to stop him. “Our fates are already woven, yours and mine together. Perhaps you could have moved a few threads, but the outcome would have remained the same.”

“Yes,” Ubba says. “Yes, of course.”

Eivor breathes a sigh of relief. He speaks of fate as much to soothe his own heart as Ubba’s. There was nothing he could have done, no way to change what was already part of the fabric of their lives.

“But if it is not my responsibility, then it it also not yours, and I do not wish you to feel guilt,” Ubba continues, quietly, speaking to his knees as he settles beside Eivor, their shoulders pressed together.

Or rather, Eivor’s shoulder pressed to Ubba’s arm. Even sitting down, he dwarfs Eivor’s smaller frame.

“No guilt,” Eivor agrees. “Only pain.”

Ubba shifts again, and then his hand falls heavy on Eivor’s thigh.

“It need not only be pain,” he murmurs.

For a moment Eivor thinks he cannot possibly mean what he means, but one look at his face tells him that he does, he means it, but he does not mean it out of some mead- or battle-addled lust.

He means it as an offer of comfort, and Eivor would choose comfort. He would choose to be comforted by this great man, to split the burden of their pain between them and ease it together.

“Yes,” he said, desperate even to his own ears. “Yes, Ubba, I—”

“Shh, little drengr,” Ubba says, his other hand moving to Eivor’s neck, palm covering the scar there, fingertips exploring the extent of it where it disappears into his hair. “No more words.”

Eivor lets Ubba push him down into the straw, the weight of his body replacing the weight of the world.

He threads his fingers into Ubba’s neat braid as the older man kisses forgiveness into his skin, hands roaming over sore places as though his touch alone was enough to heal them, and perhaps it is, perhaps this is healing the worst of his wounds.

They do not need words to speak to each other, touches saying more than they could in a thousand verses. Trust and comfort pass through every stroke—the too-tight grip covering an unpleasant bruise with a better one, the tracing of inked lines and old scars reading each other’s history on their skin.

Eivor wonders how many scars on Ubba’s body belong to Ivarr, and he wonders how many scars of his own will. They are both tapestries of the people who have touched them—in anger, in hatred, in love, and in passion. Now they are woven together forever, tangled up in each other, inseparable even by the most skilled weaver, and Eivor thinks this is good, and right.

He allows himself to nuzzle Ubba’s greying beard, wrap his legs around his solid waist, gasp and moan as they rock together, too tired for more than lazy rutting, and when he comes it is with his teeth set against Ubba’s neck, and Ubba does not flinch.

The aftermath remains wordless, Ubba washing them both down before tossing the cloth he had used to clean Eivor’s wounds earlier aside with a grunt and collapsing beside him in the straw. Eivor tries, and fails, to think of something worthy to say.

Eventually he rolls over and finds Ubba waiting, broad chest an open invitation to curl up beside him. Strong arms wrap around him, Eivor engulfed wholly by the soap-and-leather scent of Ubba’s skin, the furnace-warmth of his body, and the certainty that nothing between them, really, has changed.

Ubba presses a paternal kiss to his forehead, sighs deeply, and settles in for the night.

It does not erase the ache from Eivor’s chest, but the warmth makes it easier to bear.


End file.
